Week 9 home assignment

Submission format

Implement models, training procedures and benchmarks in .py files, run all code in a Jupyter notebook and convert it to the PDF format. Include your implementations and the report file into a .zip archive and submit it.

Task 1: knowledge distillation for image classification (6 points)

0. Finetune ResNet101 on CIFAR10: change only the classification linear layer [*] and don't freeze other weights (0 points)

Then take untrained ResNet101 model, remove the layer3 (except one conv block that creates correct number of channels for the 4-th layer) block out of it and implement 3 training setups:

1. Train the model on input data only (1 point)
2. Train the model on data and add soft cross-entropy between the student (truncated ResNet101) and the teacher (finetuned full ResNet101) (2 points)
3. Train the model as in the previous subtask, but also add the MSE loss between corresponding layer1, layer2 and layer4 features of the student and the teacher (3 points)
4. Report test accuracy for each of the models

[*] Vanilla ResNet is not very well suited for CIFAR: it downsamples the image by x32, while images in CIFAR are 32x32 pixels. So you can:

• upsample images (easiest to implement, but you will perform more computations)
• slightly change the first layers (e.g. make model.conv1 a 3x3 convolution with stride 1 and remove model.maxpool)

Feel free to use dataset and model implementation from PyTorch. For losses in 2nd and 3rd subtasks use the simple average of all inputs. For the 3rd subtask, you will need to return not only the model's outputs but also intermediate feature maps.

Training setup

• Use the standard Adam optimizer without scheduler.
• Use any suitable batch size from 128 to 512.
• Training stopping criterion: accuracy (measured from 0 to 1) stabilizes in the second digit after decimal during at least 2 epochs on test set. That means that you must satisfy condition torch.abs(acc - acc_prev) < 0.01 for at least two epochs in a row.

Task 2: use deepsparse to prune & quantize your model (4 points)

0. Please read the whole task description before starting it.
1. Install deepsparse==1.7.0 and sparseml==1.7.0. Note: they might not work smoothly with last PyTorch versions. If so, you can downgrade to torch==1.12.1.
2. Take your best trained model from subtasks 1.1-1.3 and run pruning + quantization-aware-training, adapting the following example. You will need to change/implement what is marked by #TODO and report the test accuracy of both models. (3 points)
3. Take onnx baseline (best trained model from subtask 1.1 - 1.3) and pruned-quantized version and benchmark both models on the CPU using deepsparse.benchmark at batch sizes 1 and 32. (1 point)

For task 2.3, you may find this page helpful.

You should not use training stopping criterion in this part, since the sparsification recipe relies on having certain amount of epochs.

Tips:

• Debug your code with resnet18 to iterate faster
• Don't forget model.eval() before onnx export
• Don't forget convert_qat=True in sparseml.pytorch.utils.export_onnx after you trained the model with quantization
• To visualize ONNX models, you can use netron
• Explicitly set the amount of cores in deepsparse.benchmark
• If you are desperate and don't have time to train bigger models, submit this part with resnet18

Good luck and have 59 funs!